Our blog a collaborative project where all of us may create content that we think will be interesting to an audience that cares about literary comics and graphic novels. Students: your goal is simply to create some kind of substantive content within this system that contributes to that goal. Because this is a public website, your primary audience, therefore, is not just yourself, your classmates, or even your instructor. Instead, it is a general public that may be interested in your insights related to comics and graphic novels or one of our projects. Keep that in mind. This outward-looking orientation for blog writing has some significant implications that we will likely encounter as the class blog develops, including the fact that other people will actually read your blog entries.
Topics
The content of your blog entries may cover anything related to comics and graphic novels, and not necessarily just those we are studying in the class. The only constraint is that you should simply contribute something new, where “new” means something that has not been covered before on this blog. You may want to profile a comics genre that we haven’t studied, you could provide a new theoretical point of view to one of our primary texts, you might teach a useful drawing technique, or you could trace the development of a theme across multiple works. These are just a few ideas.
Novelty is important. So to make sure that you aren’t simply rehashing ideas that others’ have already covered, make sure search for your topic first.
Requirements
Blog entries should be long enough to explore a topic or question, develop an idea or two, and come to some conclusion. At a minimum, each blog entry you write must include the following:
- An interesting, unique title (not “blog entry #1”)
- At least one image, properly uploaded and inserted (do not use “insert by URL”), that you analyze or discuss in your post
- A featured image
- Tags (3 – 5 keywords relating to content)
- An appropriate category (any one category)
- Links (at least one)
- Originality (if other bloggers have addressed your topic in any way, link to their posts and make it very clear what you’re adding to the discussion.)
Grading
Your blog entries will be graded on the minimalist grading scale. This means that if your entry meets or exceeds all of the requirements listed above, and its submitted on time, it will receive full credit (✓ or 88%). If one or more elements are lacking in some way, it will receive partial credit (75%). If it exceeds these expectations in some way, it may earn a ✓+.
If your post is submitted late, it will only be eligible for partial credit. If, however, you receive a partial credit grade for work submitted on time, you may revise and resubmit that any time before the end of the semester.
Schedule
There are five webcomic or project groups in each section of this class, and your blogging schedule is distributed according to those groups so that each group is assigned to blog during its own two-week period. During that period, you don’t necessarily need to coordinate your topics, but each person should post at least one blog entry during that period. At the conclusion of your two-week blog period, submit your blog posts in Canvas.
Submitting Your Work
To submit your work, find the appropriate assignment page in Canvas, and submit the permalink to your published article. And note: preview or draft urls will not work. (If you’re not sure what those mean, please ask!)